The dancers finished their dance, and we all applauded. I could hear a tiny clap clap behind us. My mother stood on her balcony outside her room watching. Just as quickly she vanished back inside.
After Christmas Day time was running out before Suzanne and Marty had to return to Switzerland. I was still out of school. Gifts had been packed or put away, and we were settling into being an ordinary family. I didn’t like to think about anyone leaving, and I don’t know if at seven I even had a time frame for it yet. But I knew the departure was inevitable.
On their last day no one was home but Marty and me. Dad had gone to the office, and Mrs. Betteridge had taken Suzanne and Mom to lunch at the Federal Palace hotel. Mom was getting up more, trying to be her old self, while I watched with bated breath.
While they were all out, I followed Marty onto the rooftop of the carport. He showed me how to shimmy over the railing of Mom’s balcony then hoist myself, with his help, to the flat black-tarred roof.
We’d ended up here because I’d shown Marty how I could climb up the Griffins’ back porch pole. He hadn’t seemed as impressed as I had hoped. Maybe it needed to be night with moths fluttering around. “I got a better idea,” he said, and I followed him to the balcony then onto the rooftop. We were trying to find stuff to do while we waited for Mom and Suzanne to get home, when he had plans to go to Bar Beach. He’d heard there was to be another public execution, and he wanted to go. He’d asked Philip which buses to take, so he didn’t have to tell the folks he was going.
I wanted to go, but he said it wouldn’t work. He’d get in worse trouble if I went. Like the time in Ely when his friend invited him to go flying in his Cessna, and Marty was babysitting me, so I got to tag along. Mom and Dad banished him to his room for eternity when they got home and heard the plane buzzing around the house. I remember they kept saying, “Do you have any idea what kind of danger you put Amy in?” I didn’t think that was fair. I had just had one of the best adventures looking out the plane window. He’d learned his lesson, he said.
I wanted to go with him, not so much for the execution, but because I wanted to be wherever he went. He would be home only one more day. I had to squeeze out every little moment.
“I can ask,” I said. “If we get permission this time, we won’t get in trouble.”
He stood at the edge of the carport roof, looking down at the lush green lawn that Anthony, our gardener, cut with the machete. Anthony would squat-walk across the spacious yard, all around the umbrella tree, and up against the banana trees on one side and bamboo fence on the other, as though he himself were a lawnmower. With the whack- whack back-and-forth motion of the machete in his arm, his blade so sharp that each swing of the long knife whistled in the air, he would shave the top inch off the blades of grass.
“If you ask permission, they’ll just say no,” Marty said. “I’ll tell you about it when I get back.” Then he swung his arms back and sprang off the carport roof. He landed with a big thud then rolled across the lush floor of the garden. He shot up onto his feet. “Bend your knees when you land,” he said, rubbing his shins, looking up at me. “Now you try.”
I stood where he had just stood. I remembered when we lived in Nevada, and Marty had jumped from the top of the gymnasium staircase in the high school basement. He hadn’t estimated the bend in the convex ceiling, and his skull met the sharp corner that protruded from it, cracking his head open. I was already out of kindergarten for the day, so Mom took me along when the school nurse called. I sat in the red plastic chair in Dr. Christensen’s office as he stitched Marty’s head closed.
Now as I leaned over the edge of the carport roof, he smiled up at me, his chipped tooth front and center. “Come on,” he encouraged. “It’s not that far down.”
“It’s not as far for you because you’re taller,” I explained. I didn’t want him to think I was chicken.
Black mold crept over the roof’s edge and down the white plaster like a spill. The mold felt dry and scaly, so I never touched it. I was tempted to jump, Marty standing on the soft garden of grass, the flower border of pink four o’clocks blooming at his feet, his arms outstretched. But I was chicken. It took a few moments to weigh being a scaredy-cat over disappointing him. He would be gone soon, and I needed him to remember being proud of me. I needed him to want to come back. A namby-pamby little sister? Who wants to hang out with her?
“I’ll catch you,” he said. But he looked so far away, how could I be sure?
In the distance I heard the creak of the compound’s front gates and a car engine. From my roof vantage point, I could see James swinging open one side of the big white gate, then running to the gate’s other half.
“They’re home!” I said. “Mommy’s here.”
“Jump!” he said. “Or it’ll be too late.”
This was a tough decision. I didn’t get to be with Mom much anymore. But hanging out with Marty was even more rare and more fun. If I didn’t jump I would disappoint him. He might not ask me again. We could get in trouble for this as well. I didn’t want Mom to be mad at me. And that cinched the deal. “I’ll do it later,” I said.
I turned around, scrambled back up the balcony railing and into the house. Already I regretted my decision. It was a no-win. Mom would hold it against me if I misbehaved. It exhausted her, she’d say. Marty reeked of fun. But I didn’t get to live with Marty.
Once inside, I could find my brother nowhere. I thought he’d come in the front door with Mom and Suzanne, but he hadn’t. Getting away was simple in our house. You just left. Odds were no one would notice. That’s what Marty must have done.
“Hey, Lamb Chop,” Mrs. Betteridge said, running her hand down my long hair.
“Mommy!” I said, wanting her attention more than anyone else’s.
“Not now, Amy,” she said, as she made her way into the kitchen to ask Philip to make them tea.
Once the ladies were all seated in the living room, knees crossed, tea served, all proper, I concluded I had made the wrong choice. This was boring. I’d tell on Marty, I thought, and then Mom would pay attention to me. “Marty went to the execution,” I blurted out.
Mom’s energy slowed her reactions. She sighed and shook her head. Turning to Mrs. Betteridge, she said, “That must have been why we had that horrible traffic jam. The execution on Victoria Island.”
“That’s disgusting,” Suzanne said. “Why would he want to see something like that?”
“I wanted to go see it,” I announced.
“Amy, ew!” Mom said.
“Lamb Chop,” Mrs. Betteridge said, “An execution is ugly. It’s just a big crowd of people.” She sounded like she’d seen one.
None of them understood, I thought. None of them realized the opportunity missed. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I imagined it was nothing to be scared of. It’s just a little death. Hadn’t I seen plenty of that?
The opportunity missed was to be with Marty. I wanted to see what he saw. I wanted to be grown up so these things didn’t bother me. Firing squad, schmiring squad.
I sat with my legs crossed like the ladies, their shimmering knees in panty hose, and waited for Marty to return.
When he did return from Bar Beach, I asked him what he saw. I wanted to know the gory details. I knew the soldiers carried their heavy machine guns and marched on the beach along the barbed wire fence along my schoolyard.
“I saw nothing,” he told me. “Masses of people, I couldn’t even get close enough to see anything.” But, I thought, I could have been with him. I could have been on that beach walking alongside him. We could have elbowed through the crowd together. That’s all I wanted.
The next day, suitcases sat at the top of the stairs. We woke up earlier than usual to make the trip to the airport.
At the chain-link fence next to the runway, I stood with Mom and Dad as the SwissAir flight lifted off then ascended over my head. The jet engine’s roar rushed in my ears. My ears absorbed the sound, holding it inside my drums, inside my body cavity,
the vibration, keeping us connected until the roar dissipated. The plane now silent, I watched the bold red cross on the jet’s belly get smaller and smaller until it was swallowed by the sky.
The only thing back at the house to remind me of Suzanne and Marty was my music box and the shriveled brown apple core I kept in the drawer of my nightstand until it disappeared.
Arriving home, Mom headed upstairs. Dad would be returning to the bush. I grabbed my water bottle from the kitchen counter, as Samson would be tooting his horn in the driveway soon. On the dining room table, I spied the Daily Sun where Dad had left it. I climbed into his chair and gawked at the front page. A series of photos. The first shot: a man tied to a post, the green and white oil barrels behind him. He faced the camera. The second shot: his head flung back, his eyes wide open, and his shirt ripped apart at his chest. The third shot: the man’s head dangling forward, his body limp, his eyes still open. Like Mom’s, I thought, when she lay in bed sleeping the sleep of the dead.
That was the final shot. In black and white. Just like that, from light to dark.
What did this mean? What did this horrific violence signify? How did it relate to me? Who was next? Anybody’s life could be taken at any time. Not just through an execution, but by falling in a sewer, getting malaria, turning into a goat.
I may not have thought this at seven, but I felt it in my bones. I sensed anything could happen at any moment, and I had no way of knowing when, or who, or how. The not knowing, the piles of possibilities like bodies stacking up in my imagination. Stacking up around me, blocking my view. I was being smothered by the closeness of death and musty emptiness unless I could figure out how to climb over to the other side.
Valderi, Valderahahahahahaha.
Execution on the beach in Nigeria or in a gas chamber in San Quentin, one public, one private. Is one more heinous than the other? Fewer than forty countries in the world still practice corporal punishment, and America and Nigeria are two of them. Sharia law dictates public execution, and states in the United States await a new drug that won’t botch the lethal injection.
This is my heritage but not my inheritance. Instead the effect of the physicality of death presented me with a cryptic understanding. I left Nigeria with the feeling that we all have a death sentence. Only I wasn’t awaiting mine so much as everyone else’s, wondering like the dream I’d had years ago if maybe everyone was already dead. When we died, were we merely an empty body in or on top of the ground? Did a spirit float up and away? I contemplate this too. Do these spirits visit Earth? Do we have souls? And by “we” I mean my family. Because that’s what spirits do, and that’s what my family did—visit me.
Pine-Solo
. . . gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.
—William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
The lunch hut at the American International School in Lagos, Nigeria, always smelled of pine-scented disinfectant. Buckets of the diluted Pine-Sol’s sloshy gray-brown water sat at the end of each picnic table. The open-air thatched roof hut housed rows and rows of tables crammed full of students and sheltered us from the beating midday African sun. The occasional teacher, two heads taller, wandered the rows with that supervisory meandering gaze. The rule was whoever finished lunch last had to clean the table. I lingered because I wanted to wring out the dingy rag pulled from the bucket, sniff the Pine-Sol, then wipe down the sticky table. How I liked the smell of disinfectant—how it made my head spin a little. I also liked being the good kid, the one that made the wandering teacher smile. I wanted to make the teachers happy. I wanted to wash away the sticky residue leftover from mangoes and bananas and have the teachers say I had done a good job. Good girl. Thank Heaven for Little Girls.
An ingredient in the cleanser both burned and smelled metallically sweet, like the Magic Marker or the glue pots in Nigerian culture class. I lingered over the pungency, took extra care to bring the rag to my face, to inhale. The piquancy reminded me of touching the chile pequin jar on my grandmother’s table. The tiny red peppers, no bigger than a bead, wallowed in a shaker of vinegar used to season every dish. Under the metal screw top, the rippled rim was caked in oily capsaicin. In South Texas chile pequin vinegar always stood between the salt and pepper shakers. My brother pointed, then poked me in the ribs. “Rub your fingers on the rim,” he said, “then rub it on your eyes. See what happens.” He wiggled his eyebrows.
“No, you,” I told him. We both knew if the spicy oils got near the eyes, hot zings would seethe around the rim of our lids. I came close to doing it just to please him.
I liked being alone as I cleaned the lunch hut tables. Alone in my head. Alone with my thoughts. My memories. I could remember Christmas arrival, not departure. My family made appearances then just as quickly disappeared. How they did it, how they came and went on airplanes and through illness, I got, but when and where they would reappear, I didn’t know. I had to wait. Waiting was the hardest part. When they did appear, the joy, the feeling of sanctuary hovered as temporary, because I had started to realize it would inevitably come to an end. What makes ghosts scary is not knowing when they will appear or disappear.
The pine-scented cleanser made me both light-headed and singed my eyes. The sting burned, causing me to blink. I slowed down my breathing and looked beyond my periphery, out beyond the horizon. My gaze so far off in the distance that it became unfocused and rested inside me.
The other kids had rushed out to the playground after lunch, and I usually joined them after I’d wiped down the tables and breathed in the piney scent. But on this particular day, I stood in the lunch hut doorway, staring across the playground. The painted four-square lines on the asphalt had faded, making the boundaries indeterminate. The playground looked washed out, the fun dulled. A teeter-totter banged loudly as one end slammed to the ground. Dwayne Dalton had jumped off his end while Eddie McDaniel was still midair. The plywood board laid across a fulcrum needed two weights, one on either end, to maintain the cant of balance. Someone had done that to me before—jumped off midteeter, and now I knew to never play on the teeter-totter for fear of my own weight dropped hard on the ground. I still recalled how my teeth had pounded together in my head with the force of hitting the concrete after someone abandoned me midair. I watched from a secure distance now.
With my pine-scented hands kept close to my sides, I waited. I had this darkness in my peripheral vision that wouldn’t fade. And like when my mom drug me through the grocery store parking lot, away from the hands-out, palms-upturned, mutilated beggars, the gruesomeness of their sores made me want to look, the curiosity a seduction. Like the astringent odor of the cleanser: I knew it would burn, but I couldn’t resist the head-spinning aroma. This periphery of darkness, too, intrigued me.
All the kids playing: the screeches of jubilee, the swing set’s metal chains creaking, a kid pushed higher in the air laughing, the rubber four-square ball ringing on each bounce, stomping feet vibrating the ground, dirt devils swirling, and the bright, bright sun scaring out most shadows, all the sounds became muffled inside my mind. I was intoxicated by my own darkness.
On the playground and outside the gates of AIS, beyond Victoria Island, across the bridge to Ikoyi, to Omo Osagie Street, inside my compound’s gates, I was seduced by my own muddled psyche.
A shadow leaned over me. A teacher asked, “Amy, are you okay?”
I only nodded. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t want to be disturbed in the place I had found to inhabit. Inside myself where no one could disappear.
I remember my secret—my own special juju, my own dedicated chameleon act, or maybe a way to not think about how at any moment—poof, everyone could be gone. It became my way of not being left behind or forgotten; it was how I disappeared myself. It was a secret because it was a way to be alone that I chose. A little dissociation is good for the soul.
My family could have been magicians, their specialty the disappearing act.
Tw
o New Knees
Doctor Watson: Oh, Mr. Holmes, I would love to tell you, but then, of course, I’d have to kill you.
Sherlock: That would be tremendously ambitious of you.
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles
We were transferred again. The only thing I remember about leaving Nigeria was Mom having all the household staff line up in the front garden so she could take a Polaroid. “Stand in front of the four o’clocks,” she directed. “I loved those flowers.”
I thought they were too frilly, too pink; I never liked pink anything. But I didn’t want Mom to think I disagreed, so I just observed.
Philip posed with his wives on either side of him, Okinaya holding a baby in her arms, and Ayo’s little boy standing at Philip’s feet. Pious, shorter than the others, stood an arm’s length out at the far end. Alice smiled at the other end by Ayo. James, taller and two shoulder widths wider, would have filled the space in back, but he wasn’t there.
The night before, just after dinner, James had knocked on our door. Dressed in a fancy ocher baban riga with gold embroidery, he asked my dad, “Please, Master, can I borrow twenty pound to get my father out of fridge?”
When We Were Ghouls Page 12
